by Tom Abrahams
He then led her through the bar, weaving amongst the tables until they reached the stairs leading to the second floor. He stopped at the landing, the swinging bar doors behind them and the thick humidity of sea air weighing on them. He released her hand and narrowed his gaze. The creases around his mouth tightened. This was serious.
“Pedro said I could show this to you,” he said. “It’s not something new arrivals get to see.”
“Why me?” she replied.
He motioned for her to head upstairs. As he climbed the steps one by one, his boots clacking on the solid wood behind her, he whispered an almost conspiratorial whisper. It reminded her of the countless clandestine conversations in which she’d engaged as a spy.
“Few of our new arrivals are like you, Adaliah Bancroft. This is as much for Zeke as it is for you. It will give you a better understanding of our work and what’s at stake.”
Li didn’t understand what he meant. Then again, she didn’t understand much of what anybody said here…wherever this was.
They reached the top of the stairs and she moved aside to let Barach lead. They passed her room and then turned left. Barach gripped the finial on the balustrade and used it to swing himself around the corner. He dragged a boot heel along the planks in a playful, almost childlike move. The ease of this made it seem as if he’d done it countless times before.
“How long have you been here?” Li asked.
He stole a glance over his shoulder but kept moving with the swagger of a man who knew his strengths and ignored his weaknesses. His long arms shifted with the shrug of his shoulders.
“Some days, it seems like forever,” he said. “Others it’s like a split second.”
He snapped his fingers to stress the comment. Then he reached the end of the balcony and stopped in front of a door.
“This is us,” he said, knocking on the wood.
The door creaked opened and an audible hum leaked into the hall. From inside the room, lights flickered. Barach held open the door and motioned for Li to enter.
She checked over the balustrade, looking below to the bar. Its relative antiquity and charm didn’t square with the light and noise coming from the open door. She hesitated and then entered. Her breath caught in her chest as she took in the surroundings.
Barach shut the door behind her. “What do you think?”
Her eyes adjusted to the shift in light. Her pulse raced. She didn’t know what to make of it.
Barach put his hand on her shoulder. “Impressive, right?”
The room was much larger than she would have thought from the outside, and its size didn’t square with the architecture of the cantina. It was wider and the ceiling taller.
Barach squeezed her shoulder. He lowered his face to whisper in her ear. His breath was hot, but it sent a chill along her spine and raised the hairs on her neck.
“We call it Mission Control,” he said.
Neon blue light bathed the room. The glow danced and flickered from the myriad of large glass panels that ran the length of the room at over two dozen terminals. A man or woman sat in front of each panel at knee-high desks.
“These are operators. They monitor all the missions in real time.” Barach swept his hand across the room, referencing the men and women. They sat in low, backless chairs.
He chuckled and corrected himself. “As real as time can be. I guess I should say they monitor the missions as they happen. There’s no delay. What you see on the screens in front of them is live. It’s like we’re flies on the walls. We can see and hear everything.”
The glass panels appeared to hover in front of the operators. Embedded in the desks were touch pads and keyboards, which operators manipulated with eight fingers and two thumbs. They were too engrossed in their work to notice Li or Barach.
Barach motioned for Li to step farther into the room. “They can’t affect anything,” he said. “They can’t communicate. There’s no interference. Each mission unfolds as is.”
Li’s eyes scanned from one screen to the next. They reminded her of the images from security cameras she’d seen in her previous life, only these images were crystal clear. The sound was impeccable. It was if she were looking through an open window onto a scene playing out on the street in front of her.
On the display closest to her, a group of five men ran across connected rooftops. They had weapons drawn, and they moved with the precision of tactical Marines. What struck her, though, wasn’t the dangerous operation. It was the color of the sky. A milky gray, thick like chowder. The sun was a smudge of light leaking through the haze. Was it ash? She narrowed her focus on the screen and realized the men wore protective suits. Their faces hid behind respirator-equipped masks. Their boots kicked up dust, or ash, or whatever it was from the rooftops.
Li lifted a hand to her mouth. She didn’t understand what she was seeing, but it was awful. It looked post-apocalyptic in a way that made the world from which she came seem like an oasis.
She shifted to the next closest display. On it, a trio of women on motorbikes traversed a dense wood. They jumped and maneuvered through the trees and underbrush.
The vantage pointed shifted from head-on to an overhead view, as if a drone were lifting into the sky to give a wider scope. The operator manipulated her fingers across the tablet embedded into her desk, and the view shifted again. Now she was high above the scene above the tree line; a canopy of green stretched across the display until it melted into a red sky.
The display zoomed. The sky wasn’t red. It was on fire. The forest burned. The inferno stretched from one side of the glass to the other. Thick black smoke plumed from the tops of the trees. The fire moved fast, consuming more and more of the screen.
Li’s eyes skipped to the next screen and the next. All of them showed horrific hellscapes. None of them looked peaceful. None of them made Li want to step through the glass and into a new paradise.
Li gasped. Through her hands, both of which now covered her mouth, she muttered, “Where are these places?”
The hum of the electronics muted her question. Barach leaned in closer and asked, “What did you say?”
She tried again. This time speaking too loudly. “Where are these places!”
Her volume drew the attention of the operators. All of them, dozens of sets of eyes, locked on her. Their expressionless stares somehow carried admonishment with them.
She tried again, finding the middle ground between a whisper and a shout. “What is happening?”
The operators, as if invisibly synchronized, returned to their work, keenly studying the horrible images on their screens and tapping away at controls.
Barach put his hand on the small of Li’s back. He was trying to comfort her, she assumed, but she reflexively jumped at his touch. He pulled away quickly.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you,” he said. “I just—”
Li regarded him through glassy eyes. She knew the tears were there. She willed them to disappear, but they clung to her lower lids and threatened to spill over.
“Why are you showing me this?” she asked.
Barach took a deep breath. “You asked three questions. I’ll answer them one at a time.”
She touched her fingers to the corners of her eyes, dabbing them. It didn’t help. The first tear ran down her cheek.
“Please,” she said.
Barach referenced the myriad screens. “As I said, this is Mission Control. Every terminal, every screen displays a different mission. The people you see on the screens are Watchers. All of them are charged with maintaining the balance of good and evil, light and dark. At any given time, there could be hundreds of missions in different times.”
“Different times?”
Barach led her to an empty terminal at the back of the room and sat her down. He pulled out the backless chair next to her and faced her.
“That’s question number four,” he said. “Let me answer the others first. As to where these places are. They’re all the same pl
ace in different iterations. Different versions of Earth.”
She studied his face. He was serious as far as she could tell. Li didn’t know him well enough to understand his tells, but he didn’t show the signs of someone lying. He looked her straight in the eye. He didn’t touch his face or hesitate when he spoke. He was telling his truth.
Barach inched forward on his seat. “As to your second question, what’s happening is the effort to create that balance, to tip the scales one way or the other. It’s more complicated than it might seem. There are ripple effects from every mission. It requires a constant reordering of things. Right now, a lot of our focus is on the future iterations of Earth after various apocalyptic events. Once we straighten these out, there will be a need to go back into the past and tweak things here or there. And then it’s back to the future and so on.”
She heard what he was saying, but had trouble processing it. “You’re saying there is more than one Earth? More than one future?”
He smiled in a way that was both sympathetic and condescending. “That’s two more questions. No and yes. There is only one Earth, but there are divergent paths for that Earth. Every time we fix the balance, a new future sprouts.”
She furrowed her brow. This was too much.
“Think of the Earth like a plant,” Barach continued. “It starts as a seed or a bulb. Then it sprouts. There’s a single trunk or stalk, but from that spreads the branches. Each branch has two or three or more branches. And those have more branches. It’s infinite, the numbers of branches that sprout from that single seed or bulb.”
She understood that. “Okay.”
“The tree or plant never stops growing. It’s always shifting and changing. Sometimes it gets sick, infected with disease, and that threatens all the branches. Our job is to find the root of that disease and cut it out. Sometimes doing that might cause the disease to infect another part of the tree. It’s a never-ending battle.”
Li’s eyes danced across the monitors and the operators manipulating them, cataloguing the missions as they unfolded in real time. Whatever real time meant.
“You asked me why I chose to show you this,” said Barach. “It wasn’t my choice. It was Pedro’s. He wanted you to see this because Zeke is in the middle of a mission right now. He thought you should see him, see what he’s doing.”
All the questions floating in her head, poking their way to her lips, evaporated. She couldn’t remember a single one of them. Not now. Not with the invocation of Zeke’s name.
She stood and searched the floating glass displays. “Where is he?”
Barach put his hand on her back again. This time she didn’t flinch. She kept her eyes up, searching the apocalyptic and dystopian landscapes as Barach stood and guided her toward the far end of the room. There were hundreds of terminals, and it seemed the farther they walked, the longer the path became. The room extended with each step. She glanced over her shoulder and couldn’t see the door through which they’d entered.
They stopped at a terminal with a dour-looking man at the controls. His long, thin fingers appeared to claw at the controls embedded in the desk. The headset was ill-fitting on his oblong, narrow head. He had a beak of a nose and a gray complexion.
Barach seemed to ignore the hawkish operator. He pointed at the display. “Here we are. This is Zeke’s mission. So far, so good, from what I can see.”
Li stared at the screen and soaked in every millimeter, every pixel on the translucent glass display. There was no sound playing, but she could see the world into which Zeke had vanished.
Deep blue water spanned from one corner of the display to the next. The vantage point was from above. White scratches that swelled and shrank marked the waves on the ocean’s current. In the center of the display cruised a large sleek-looking boat.
It was impossible to gauge the speed, but it appeared from the wake that the boat was moving at a good clip. The scale of the ocean around it was immeasurable. It reminded Li of the waters that now surrounded the cantina. She could almost taste the brine, smell the strong odor of kelp and decay.
She kept her eyes on the display, following the boat’s course as she spoke. “Is Zeke on the boat?”
Barach touched the operator’s shoulder. The man was unmoved, but he answered in a monotone voice loud enough for Li to hear him over the constant din of the electronics and the hiss of air flowing through overhead vents.
“Yes,” said the operator. “Ezekiel is on the boat. As are Watchers Uriel and Phil. The charge for this mission, Lucius Mander, is also aboard.”
Barach jutted his chin at the display. His body stiffened. “What about Gabe?”
The operator moved his fingers across the tablet and tapped with his thumbs. The image shifted to a close-up of the boat. On the back deck lay a body. A large muscular man tattooed on his arms and across his neck. His eyes were closed. Several projectiles protruded from his body. As the people around him stood in silent observance, the body dimmed. Then it faded and disappeared. The projectiles, which looked like arrows, clattered onto the boat’s deck.
“Gabe’s role in the mission is complete,” the operator said. “He’s returned to the cantina and is meeting with Pedro.”
Li backed away from the display. Her hands shot to the sides of her head, massaging out a headache. All of this was too much. The more she learned, the less she wished she knew.
Barach nodded slowly, appearing to come to terms with the news.
“It happens,” he said to Li. “Sometimes we don’t make it through a mission. Usually, it’s self-sacrifice. Part of the job.”
Ventilation air hissed above Li, blowing across the top of her head. She took another step back and pointed at the screen.
“He’s not dead?” she asked.
Barach shook his head. “Can’t kill what’s already dead. Like I said, it’s not the first time this has happened. Truth be told, it’s rare we get through a mission without a casualty.”
He made air quotes with his fingers. His dimples returned. His teeth glowed in the blue light. “I got knocked out of the mission that brought you here,” he offered. “I was out early. Pretty nasty one too. Happened in an Impala.”
She studied him but said nothing.
“The car. Not the animal.”
She stared blankly at him.
“Chevy Impala?” he said.
She shook her head. “I don’t know what that is, and I’ve never heard of an impala animal.”
“It’s an antelope.”
“There isn’t much wildlife where I’m from,” she said. “Most of what I know I’ve read about or seen pictures. As for the car, I know what a Superbird is. I’ve seen trucks. Not a Chevy Impala. Is it a truck?”
“No. It’s a car. Kind of a classic, I guess. Pretty popular in the second half of the twentieth century.”
She waved a hand across the room with a sweeping motion toward the rows of floating glass displays. Her eyes narrowed. “Which twentieth century?”
His dimples creased. “Good point. Most of them? All of them? No way to know.”
Li’s eyes shifted and settled back on the screen in front of them. The view was at sea level, tracking beside the boat at the same speed. A figure emerged from the boat’s interior and stood on the back deck. Though he was backlit by the sunlight behind him, Li recognized Zeke.
He was alone. His hands rested on his hips. The Stetson sat low on his head.
Li couldn’t see his eyes. She wanted to see his eyes.
“Is there a way to reposition the angle?” she asked.
She took two steps closer to the screen and stood behind the operator. He maneuvered his fingers on the desk without answering. The view on the glass shifted, rising to the overhead vantage point she’d seen when they first stopped at this terminal.
“Not that way,” she said softly. “Could you please show me his face? I want to see him.”
The operator glanced up at her. His lips were pursed. His pinched nostrils flared.
Barach must have sensed the operator’s hesitation or resistance. He moved to the man’s side and squeezed his arm. “Please do it.”
The operator sighed. His fingers danced across the controls. The angle smoothly lowered and panned. It widened then zoomed in on Zeke.
He faced the boat’s stern. Half of his face was lit, half in dark, and it appeared tight with stress. His gaze was distant, his mind working like it always used to. Li saw these things. She recognized them as both familiar and strange.
The camera slowly zoomed. His face grew larger in the glass display. She studied the visible creases at the edges of his eyes, the stubble that peppered his jawline and the space between his upper lip and nose.
Zeke was hardened somehow. His boyish appearance gave way to something less optimistic. Was it his coloring? His drawn expression? The sadness in his eyes? Or was it worry?
Li saw him take in a ragged breath, his chest rising and filling with air. He held it before blowing it out through puffed cheeks.
From behind Li, Barach offered his assessment. “It’s mission stress.”
“What do you mean?” Li asked, unable to pry her eyes from him. It was mesmerizing.
“I’ve seen that look before. It’s mission stress. There are a million things running through Zeke’s mind right now. Missions are tough enough for seasoned Watchers with a thousand operations behind them. This is only his second, and it’s the first he’s running. That’s a lot of responsibility.”
“What’s the mission?”
Barach tapped the operator’s shoulder. “Mission parameters?”
The operator lifted a hand from the desk and adjusted the headset microphone. He scratched his head and then ran the hand across the back of his neck. He said nothing.
“It’s not classified,” said Barach. “At least not to us. If it were, we wouldn’t be in here.”
Spinning in his backless chair, the operator faced Li.
“The mission requires the retrieval of the weapon called Kalevanmiekka,” he said. “It belonged to the Watcher Josephine. The secondary mission requires the rescue of a child, Anaxi Mander. Her father, Lucius Mander, is the charge.” He looked her up and down as he spoke. It was monotone, as if a rote recitation of something he’d memorized but to which he had no connection or interest.
